Health care organizations are increasingly turning to evidence-based approaches to improve quality of care. For instance, health care organizations typically employ clinical guidelines that provide recommendations based on the best available medical scientific evidence. Health care quality can be measured by comparing clinical actions to guideline recommendations.
The results of such comparisons can be used by health care organizations to determine areas of excellence within their organizations as well as those areas that need improvement. This information provides an objective basis for planning and making budgeting decisions. In addition, it may be used to demonstrate accountability to the public and back up claims of quality.
Currently, solutions that address the issue of quality of care usually only focus on retrospective comparisons with clinical guidelines. Although retrospective comparisons can provide valuable information, there are generally few mechanisms in place for ensuring adherence to guidelines during the course of patient treatment. Such information would be very useful in determining problems as they happen, so that corrective action could immediately be taken.
As health care organizations migrate toward environments where most aspects of patient care management are automated, it is now easier to collect and analyze patient information. However, health care organizations tend to maintain information in a myriad of unstructured and structured data sources. For example, it may be necessary to access numerous different databases, each with its own peculiar format. Worse, physician notes may have to be consulted. These notes usually are nothing more than free text dictations, and it may be very difficult to sift through the notes to gather the necessary information. As a result, the effort taken to collect information is usually time consuming, expensive, and error prone.
Given the importance of providing quality of care information, it would be desirable and highly advantageous to generate accurate quality adherence information during the course of patient treatment.